“Lord god of models and marvels, behold them! My dear, did you ever see two such legs on one small woman! Look at the roundness and taperingness. They’re boy’s legs. I’ve seen featherweights go into the ring with legs like those. And they’re all-woman’s legs, too. Never mistake them in the world. The arc of the front line of that upper leg! And the balanced adequate fullness at the back! And the way the opposing curves slender in to the knee that _is_ a knee! Makes my fingers itch. Wish I had some clay right now.” “It’s a true human knee,” his wife concurred, no less breathlessly; for, like her husband, she was a sculptor. “Look at the joint of it working under the skin. It’s got form, and blessedly is not covered by a bag of fat.” She paused to sigh, thinking of her own knees. “It’s correct, and beautiful, and dainty. Charm! If ever I beheld the charm of flesh, it is now. I wonder who she is.” Stanley Patterson, gazing ardently, took up his half of the chorus. “Notice that the round muscle-pads on the inner sides that make most women appear knock-kneed are missing. They’re boy’s legs, firm and sure—” “And sweet woman’s legs, soft and round,” his wife hastened to balance. “And look, Stanley! See how she walks on the balls of her feet. It makes her seem light as swan’s down. Each step seems just a little above the earth, and each other step seems just a little higher above until you get the impression she is flying, or just about to rise and begin flying . . . ” So Stanley and Mrs. Patterson. But they were artists, with eyes therefore unlike the next batteries of human eyes Ida Barton was compelled to run, and that laired on the Outrigger _lanais_ (verandas) and in the _hau_-tree shade of the closely adjoining seaside. The majority of the Outrigger audience was composed, not of tourist guests, but of club members and old-timers in Hawaii. And even the old-times women gasped. “It’s positively indecent,” said Mrs. Hanley Black to her husband, herself a too-stout-in-the-middle matron of forty-five, who had been born in the Hawaiian islands, and who had never heard of Ostend. Hanley Black surveyed his wife’s criminal shapelessness and voluminousness of antediluvian, New-England swimming dress with a withering, contemplative eye. They had been married a sufficient number of years for him frankly to utter his judgment. “That strange woman’s suit makes your own look indecent. You appear as a creature shameful, under a grotesqueness of apparel striving to hide some secret awfulness.” “She carries her body like a Spanish dancer,” Mrs. Patterson said to her husband, for the pair of them had waded the little stream in pursuit of the vision.